A lone group of Swiss scientists have been using scattered LEDs, neural circuity, and an army of miniature robots to explore the very basis of good and evil. No, you aren't reading the back cover of a DVD in the "one dollar each, please get this trash out of our store" bin of your local blockbuster -this research is very real and very, very awesome.

Dario Floreano and his team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology built a swarm of mobile
robots, outfitted with light bulbs and photodetectors. These were set
loose in a zone with illuminated "food" and "poison" zones which
charged or depleted their batteries. Their programming was initially
random, so the first generation staggered around the place like bunch
of concussed puppies.

At intervals, the robots were shut down and those that had the most
charge left in their batteries were chosen as "successful", and their
neural programming was combined to produce the next generation of the
robots. These offspring are downloaded into the same mechanical bodies
their parents inhabited, forming an closed-circuit Buddhist system
which might be an extremely efficient method of maintaining a stable
population, but will provide a serious headache for any robot
philosophers who might turn up.

Which could happen before long. Within fifty generations of this
electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed -
helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is
the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged
which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting
brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food
zone - presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon
carving of a handlebar moustache.

You might be upset by this result, scientific proof that those who say
"Evil is utterly fundamental to human nature" actually understates the
scope of the problem, there were also silicon souls on the side of the
angels. Some robots advanced fearlessly into poison zones, flashing
warning lights to keep other robots out of harms way.

At this rate of evolution, how long before we start to see other
behaviors? Maybe polarized priests, warning other robots not to eat
any food so that they may receive infinite food after they're switched
off. Or actorbots, given huge quantities of food because they can
pretend to be turned off by poison really well?

WOW IM SHOKED TO SEE THE ROBOTS MAKE GOOD DESSISION AND BAD DESSISION , WUT IF THAT WUZ THE REAL SOURCE OF GOOD AN EVIL JUST WISE N NONE WISE DESSISIONS . HHMMM I PONDER . CAN DA MOVIE WITH ROBIN WILLIAMS AS THE ROBOT WHO TURNS HIMSELF HUMAN COULD ACTUALLY ONE DAY BE TRU
.

Interesting - where did the programming for the robots come from? did it also evolve out of nothing or was their intelligent programmers writing the programs? This experiment only proves that intelligent input it required to get the robots to do whatever they are doing. They didn't evolve their behaviours from scratch.

How long before the robots seek out the individuals who placed the poison in their midst seeking vengeance or justice for their fallen commrades? Who would do the seeking. The robots of good intent or the evil robots?

Sssshhhhh! Don't let ahmed know that. It'll make his head explode. He's content thinking we did the programming which allows him to believe that Allah or Yahweh or Yeshua programmed him...which also means other people are programmed to fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up, or molest little children in sunday school.

To ahmed: The system is probably one of those that use a preset "neural" system (effectively filled with 0's in the coding) that link to the muscle-mechanical system. Over time, coding fills in with 1s where appropriate in correlation to the muscle-mechanical system as to be of benefit as random 1s found their way onto the neural system. Read: natural selection (some laymen simply call it simply "evolution," it's a shame) with AI gene pools. - all such systems I know of use this or something similar.

To Cosmogeist: Well, that comment just showed your atheist bigotry. Of course, I'm the only one with any college level degree in philosophy here... so no one else will get this reference. *ponders deeply* Well, putting it up for passer-by won't hurt...

But what does that teach us besides that only fringe groups use this site? ;)

An interesting thing to discuss on the back of this article would be whether you can really call this a display of good and evil amongst machines. Surely it is something else; doesn't the robot make a decision based on what it understands from sensors and programming, and therefore has no ultimate choice based on 'conscience'?

It is impossible that the "program/routine" that is downloaded from "generation to generation" is nothing other than the pure sum total of each previous robots "experience" without any guidance from the programmers.

For a robot to "evolve" into a state of being where it actively "chooses" to mislead "fellow comrades" into the poison zones on the basis that itself would have more "food", implies that they are coded to consider the receipt of "food" to be good as opposed to bad. The only alternative is to assume the robots were conscious from the beginning and therefore able to make subjective decisions, albeit binary, which is ofcourse not true.

Clearly the full details with regards to the extent of the robots programming isn't being revealed in this short article.

A very poor attempt by those that are unable to accept that darwin is wrong, perhaps one day "they" (darwinian junkies) will evolve themselves :)

One last thought for the darwinian junkies to ponder upon :) How do you expect to create anything above and beyond your level of thought, when your thinking process is a closed circuit itself, based upon the principles of natural selection?

There's a sucker born every minute, and they end up as "scientists" as opposed to philosophers :)

Perhaps you are the only one with a BA in philosophy here, as I have a masters. (big dick contest won...until the phds get here)

The philosophical errors in this post and the following comments are so varied and multitudinous one could perhaps earn a phd merely by taking the gargantuan effort to refute them one by one—a simply task, yes; but an enormous undertaking as well.

I shall only begin by noting the pervasive anthropomorphism involved in the author description of the robots behavior. This is of course the fatal flaw in your argument, as it begs the question entirely. You claim that robots have demonstrated human like behavior, and yet it is your who have merely interpreted their behavior as human-like. There are birds, insects, fish, and myriad other creatures which exhibit apparent forms of deception and altruism—all of which may be anthropomorphized, but which are more effectively described and predictable within the discourse of evolutionary ecology and behavioral ecology. These machines are not exhibiting human-like behavior; they are exhibiting robot-like behavior, in the same way that birds are bird-like and and fish are fish-like.

In fact, we have no reason to assume at all that robots would evolve human-like intelligence or reasoning whatsoever, especially considering the vast differences that characterize human and computer/robotic memory and recall, as well as in processing capacities and in sensory equipment. No doubt the likelihood that human and robotic intelligence would not resemble one another is increased in any robot system that develops itself outside of direct human involvement (i.e., Evolutionary Computation); we can of course always *try* to make robots that resemble ourselves, but left to their own devices (sorry, no pun intended), I have serious doubts about their resemblance to humans at all.

Any individual who believes that the measure of philosopical knowledge that another person beholds, can be determined by the letters after their name such as BA, Masters, PHD, quite simply isn't a philosopher.... I'm afraid academic dogma purveys the philosophical school just as far as the "sciences".

Accuracy comes from within, as opposed to without, and within has no visible form and therefore no letters.

Well, you can always identify an individual who is incapable of debating the issue at hand, as they spend their entire time searching for grammatical errors... its a phenomena that never fails to bring a smile to my facial expression :)